This invention is directed to a clarinet key mechanism to improve the facility of clarinet fingering.
The Boehm clarinet has been a traditional key system for clarinet usage. It is used on nearly all present-day clarinets in the United States and is the conventional system learned in the United States schools. The Boehm system has several drawbacks in particular keying situations. In that system, B-flat, keyed in the traditional way by means of the A key and the register key, is fuzzy and weak. It has been recognized that this note has needed improvement.
Rosario Mazzeo, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,867,146, defines a structure whereby he intends to improve the throat tone B-flat by employing the right-hand rings and left-hand second finger ring. Mazzeo opens a hole on the side at the correct acoustical position in conjunction with the opened A, A-flat holes to produce a good B-flat tone. In this Mazzeo patent, when slurring from any note involving the rings to the A key, an unwanted intermediate note is sometimes produced. This has been corrected by a later Mazzeo U.S. Pat. No. 3,204,512 with a result that the rings are harder to press. Thus, while the Mazzeo construction does produce a good B-flat tone, it is at the expense of facility of keying.